FreePBX 13 BETA GUI Updater

A few weeks ago we pushed out the first beta release of FreePBX 13. This beta was primarily pushed out as a manually install tarball and beta distro release for our advanced users. These community members and our internal testers have been testing and ironing out bugs to allow expansion to a wider audience. Our desire is to be as stable as possible even in beta for our community.

Two weeks ago we did a soft launch of our GUI Update utility. This allows anyone running FreePBX 12 to upgrade to 13 by way of the FreePBX UI. If you are running FreePBX 12 you can go in to Admin -> Module Admin and click check online.

Keep in mind that we have done our best to make sure this is safe enough for production use but we cannot account for all use cases. There are likely still bugs unaccounted for and you may be the one to find them. Before updating please make a backup. As a BETA this is not recommended for production use.

We put a heavy focus on the core open source code that is FreePBX. If you use any of our premium add on modules to enhance the FreePBX experience, they may not be fully functional. If you use commercial modules update with caution.

This was caused by the table asterisk.faxpro_hook_core which is used by the "Fax Configuration Professional" module. Wanting to play it safe I restored from my backup and I then deinstalled it the module (so that it would remove the table cleanly).

I reran both scripts.

This time it completed successfully...

I then reinstalled the "Fax Configuration Professional" module and disabled it (this is what I do with modules I don't currently use but are part of the distro, I don't normally uninstall them.

It recreated the table but now the page and id fields (which are part of the key) are no longer 255 characters long but 150... I guess with the conversion to UTF-8 the key was now too long (the max is 1000 for the type of index used on this table apparently) and has been shortened... As this table was created before I switched to FreePBX 13 it had the old length...

I then tried to enter characters which were not supported by Latin1 (ISO-8859-1)...

I tried characters which needed ISO-8559-16 (or a variant of Unicode) and even Cyrillic and both were correctly handled...

(I have a very basic understanding of Romanian and Russian...)

I then fixed all the entries which had their characters mangled because of the initial upgrade to FreePBX 13, there weren't that many...

The only problem I noticed is that some screens seem not to handle the apostrophe (ie ' ) correctly but I don't think this is related to runing this script, they probably need to escape them. The IVR screen (IIRC) did but you see the backslash it precedes the apostrophe with in some places while the time group screen seems to discard an entry that has it altogether (probably because the SQL fails to execute because of that (most likely unescaped) apostrophe...)...

Obviously this is not for everyone but as for me I am happy with the results... The accents/special characters were already mangled to begin with so as long as I wasn't losing anything else I was ok with correcting them after...